Snacks are very busy, a "Disney" alternative for young people

In the retail consumption arena, Snacks is Busy has quickly become a new favorite among young people with its unique brand charm and innovative marketing strategies. This article will explore the success of Snacks is Busy and analyze how it stands out in the fiercely competitive snack mass-marketing market and becomes a "Disney" alternative for young people.

The snack industry is very busy, and this year is really busy. We are busy opening tens of thousands of stores and fulfilling our idol-chasing dreams.

In June this year, Mingminghenmang officially announced that the number of its snacks and Zhao Yiming snacks dual-brand stores exceeded 10,000, becoming the first company in the snack mass-marketing market to have 10,000 stores. According to Jihai data, in the past three months, the number of new stores of the snacks and Zhao Yiming brand alone exceeded 1,000.

As a leading player in the market, Snacks is growing rapidly not only in the number of stores, but also in the strength of product promotion. The rising status of spokespersons is the most obvious manifestation of this.

Snacks is Busy was founded in 2017, and the brand name was inspired by Jay Chou's single "Busy Cowboy". From the first spokesperson Du Haitao in 2020, to the popular young actor Zhang Yixing in 2023, to this year's "national idol" Jay Chou, after 7 years of establishment, Snacks is Busy finally realized its "star-chasing dream".

The popularity of snacks is a microcosm of the snack mass-market track.

According to a report by Founder Securities, the total number of snack hypermarkets will be around 8,000 in 2022, but by October 2023, the iMedia Research report showed that the number had exceeded 22,000. In the past few years when the consumer track was cold, the snack hypermarket track was in full swing.

In April 2021, Snacks is Busy received a 240 million yuan Series A financing led by Sequoia China and Gaorong Capital. In February 2023, Zhao Yiming Snacks received a 150 million yuan Series A investment. In addition, Snacks Youming, Snacks Frog, etc. have all received financing in the past two years.

When it comes to snack hypermarkets, most people's first reaction is "cheap". But are they really cheap?

"A bag of loose chicken feet costs 2.47 yuan," and "a Shuanghui King of Kings sausage, which is half the size of a regular sausage, costs 1.01 yuan." Many people on Xiaohongshu said that they encountered assassins in the snack market.

In fact, the price of the same specification products in supermarkets and convenience stores is lower than that in snack shops. And the price of large packages online is much cheaper.

This makes people wonder why snack hypermarkets, which are not absolutely price competitive, suddenly exploded, and how did Snacks Become a leader in this category?

1. "Low price" is a bait to attract caloric indulgence

Consumers' words and deeds are inconsistent, which is a common situation encountered in market research. Although many consumers regard low prices as the reason why they choose snack hypermarkets, in fact, low prices are only one of the factors that influence their consumption decisions.

"I saw it while shopping, so I took a look and bought it because I was attracted by the packaging."

"Every time I just want to try something new, and if it tastes good, I'll buy a large package online or in the supermarket."

This is a typical sample of consumer behavior in our survey. The two respondents were born in the 1990s and 1995s respectively. Trying new things, buying randomly, and paying attention to packaging are the keywords that drive purchases. From entering the store to buying, the decision-making factors are less correlated with low prices.

Similar to them, young people account for a large proportion of snack consumers. Compared with the stockpiling behavior driven by low prices, they enjoy the process of shopping and exploring new products more, and are attracted by novel products and good-looking packaging.

This means that in-store consumption behavior is not a rigid, rationally driven purchase of targeted snacks, but rather an impulse purchase generated by the inducement of the specific environment of the snack hypermarket.

The low price is the “bait” that triggers this behavior to start.

Common snack hypermarkets use the logic of "drinks - standard products - bulk" to arrange products, and the prices of drinks and standard products are lower than those of other channels. These affordable products have established consumers' inertial perception of "value for money" in the stores, and have reduced their judgment of prices in the subsequent purchase process.

A large portion of bulk foods are non-head brands and new categories, and there is no mature large KA channel for comparison. Users have not yet formed a price framework and it is difficult to quickly judge the rationality of the price. In addition, under the weighing price, users do not have a great sense of the weight of a single product when selecting.

This makes consumers belatedly aware of the "price assassin". However, in the decision-making process, price is the last step. Arousing consumer desire is the first step.

Compared with online channels and supermarkets, the advantages of snack hypermarkets are concentrated product categories, the ability to give consumers a five-sense experience, and instant enjoyment. These are all promotional props that snack hypermarkets intentionally create.

The basic need to try new things is similar to innovation, which is an important nature in the process of human development. However, most of the time, the cost of satisfying this need is very high, and snack shops have lowered this threshold by selling in bulk. The same is true for beauty and cosmetics stores that sell samples.

In addition to low product barriers, the environment is also an important source of stimulation.

Most snack stores use warm lighting, with red and yellow as the main colors. In color psychology, red can stimulate appetite, and yellow can create a comfortable and warm feeling. The use of spotlights and LED lights further highlights newly launched or promotional products, attracts customers' attention, and increases the attractiveness of products.

In addition, humans' preference for high-calorie foods is deeply rooted in their genes. In order to survive, early humans had to adapt to an environment of food shortage, so they developed an instinctive preference for energy-dense foods. This love of calories still affects our choices today.

Specific shopping environments sometimes make people temporarily forget their healthy, low-fat diet requirements. Especially during economic downturns, consumers may look for low-cost ways to relax and reward themselves. Snacks, as a quick source of dopamine, satisfy people's desire for instant happiness during this period.

Under these conditions, consumers buy not only snacks themselves, but also a way to release the strict self-requirements in daily life. Perhaps for the previous generation who experienced material scarcity, discounts can win their favor. But for this generation of young people, happiness has a greater meaning.

Compared with convenience stores that mark calories, shopping malls that have opened 0-calorie areas, and the wide variety of high-calorie snacks in hypermarkets are like a floor full of happiness factors. The bright shopping environment and colorful snacks are more likely to break people's defenses than the visual experience of online shopping. Besides, food is also about sex.

2. Tasty and affordable > healthy, focusing on attracting young people

“Any category can be remade with new consumption.” This sentence that was popular in the new consumption circle a few years ago also applies to snacks.

As mentioned above, snacks are not only about selling products, but also about the experience brought by a specific environment. Therefore, its redesign is also aimed at young people, changing the traditional product-oriented purposeful shopping to experiential shopping driven by both snacks and the environment. This difference can be clearly seen in the store location and product strategy.

The location of the store determines the target customer group. Compared with its own brand snack shops and convenience stores, the store distribution of Snacks is significantly different. According to Jihai data, the proportion of residential stores in the distribution of Snacks is 35.09%, while Laiyifen and Meiyijia account for 68.56% and 74.6% respectively.

The previous generation of snack brands, represented by Yifen, mainly targeted household users, who demanded high-quality, stable product supply. Therefore, they were mainly distributed around residential areas. Convenience stores, on the other hand, meet the small commodity shopping needs of the general population, and residential demand is stable, making them the preferred choice.

Compared with their purely product-driven retail logic, Busy Snacks has also added an experience logic, targeting young people as their main users and satisfying their desire for trying new things and enjoying instant shopping.

This also leads to the distribution of office buildings, shopping malls, and schools accounting for more than 50% of the stores where snacks are very busy. These places are mostly young people, who not only have shopping needs, but also experience and social needs. They are more likely to make impulse purchases under environmental stimulation.

The difference in location selection reflects the trade-offs that Snacks is Busy has made in terms of customer selection. However, as a channel, products and shopping environment jointly determine the attractiveness of Snacks is Busy to target users.

Essentially, Snacks is busy playing the role of a "snack buyer", and its first priority is to help consumers choose products that meet their needs. According to reports, Snacks is busy in 2023, the total number of consumers received by stores nationwide exceeded 340 million, which means that most consumers are not single-time users.

To generate long-term repeat purchases, you need to rely on either affordability or continuous freshness. This requires high purchasing and product selection capabilities. The support behind purchasing capabilities is the number of demands and the number of stores. This is also a direct explanation for the current market scramble of major snack mass-market brands.

Compared with this, the product strategy is more worth discussing. According to Xiaohongshu, Snacks is busy updating new products every week.

In terms of product selection, the official accounts of Snacks have emphasized that delicious taste, quality and safety, and low prices are the key points of their products, but the word "healthy" hardly appears in the official statements of Snacks. This is also a reflection of its product selection strategy.

It was shared in the "Business Reference" course that when selecting products, Snacks is very busy and will not reject products with high oil content, high sugar content, or additives, because these products can make them "delicious". In the definition of Snacks is very busy, deliciousness takes precedence over health.

According to its official account, the retention rate of snacks is only 1.5-2%, and it needs to go through six screening steps: "product center tasting - consumer tasting - online information review - store trial sales - laboratory testing - factory inspection".

At the same time, in order to save money, Snack Shop will also find some "low-priced substitutes" for high-priced snacks. For example, "air-dried meat" made of pork can be used to replace "air-dried beef", reducing the price of products with the same taste by 2/3.

However, snacks are the basic demand. In order to increase its appeal to young people, Snacks is Busy will also select some popular items that are not in its conventional business scope. For example, recently Snacks is Busy introduced a Sanrio blind box at 8.8 yuan per piece as a topic to attract traffic.

Grasping the new needs of the target group and finding good products can support the successful operation of a store. However, there are no secrets in business. To maintain the first-mover advantage, it is necessary to continue to leave a mark in the minds of users.

3. Theme stores create brand IP and interesting content stimulates self-propagation

Taking 2021 as the dividing point, the marketing of Snacks is Busy can be divided into two stages. The first stage is to vertically deepen the mindset of "Hunan high-quality snack brand"; the second stage is to horizontally expand the popularity and create a "national internet celebrity".

There are two reasons for choosing this node. One is that Snacks is Very Busy received 230 million in Series A financing in 2021. The other is that Snacks is Very Busy moved out of Hunan and entered Jiangxi, Hubei and other places this year.

In the first stage, the snack mass-marketing market had not yet entered a fierce competition. The main task of Snacks is to deeply root in Hunan and lay a solid foundation for the brand. During this period, its product promotion focused on cities, leveraging Changsha's Internet celebrity brands and Hunan's active fan economy.

In 2020, Snacks is Busy had not yet emerged, but Cha Yan Yue Se was already a well-known online celebrity brand in Changsha. Using Cha Yan Yue Se's anti-counterfeiting efforts to clarify its own counterfeit stores, the post "Fighting counterfeits, I, Snacks is Busy, will definitely help @Cha Yan Yue Se" became the top-reading WeChat account of Snacks is Busy that year.

In addition to "riding on" brands, binding with celebrities is also a way for Snacks to attract traffic. In November 2020, Du Haitao became the first spokesperson for Snacks. Later, when the direct stores and theme stores opened, many artists were invited to the platform.

Hunan is equivalent to the first line of defense for Snacks to break into the national market. In 2021, after financing, Snacks is busy starting its second phase.

At this time, the snack mass-market market has turned from a blue ocean to a red ocean. In order to compete for consumers' attention, Snacks is Busy has adopted two main strategies: one is to use spokespersons to quickly increase popularity through centralization, and the other is to use stores to build its own IP and create a social media matrix.

In centralized communication, the media is no longer tied to Hunan and Mango TV, but appears more often in variety shows and TV series. The same is true for spokespersons, from Du Haitao to the more widely recognized Zhang Yixing, and now to the national idol Jay Chou.

A more interesting change is in its social media communication strategy: using theme stores as IPs, building interactive scenarios, and creating self-made social media content to trigger UGC communication.

According to Qiangua data, among the topics related to Snacks Busy on Xiaohongshu, #超级零食很忙# is the hottest topic. Since the beginning of this year, Snacks Busy has opened theme stores "Super Snacks Busy", "Snacks Are Big", and "Snacks Are Spicy" in Changsha. At the same time, Xiaohongshu and Douyin have established official media accounts with the same names for these three theme stores.

These stores are located around Jiefang West Road, focusing on high-frequency activity areas for young people. The stores are equipped with topical check-in devices and product packaging with dissemination. For example, Super Snacks is very busy, with giant receipts and other devices, using the US dollar max version to make giant fish grilled packaging, and using cigarette boxes to make spicy strips packaging.

Based on the stores, each store IP account will disseminate content based on young people’s “joy points” and “pain points”.

Take "Super Snacks is Busy" as an example. Its content themes are divided into three categories. The first category is the real-time daily life of the store, which mainly shoots scenes of crowded stores to show how popular the store is.

The second category is busy and crazy daily life, taking people as the first-person perspective, filming the strange uses of "super snacks" in various scenarios, such as using busy snacks as game props at a wedding, and using busy snacks as suitcases on the way home.

The third category is new product spoilers, but in this series, the taste of the product is not emphasized, but the new product is placed in a funny and novel scene, with more topicality than edibility. For example, the super long spicy strips are named "1 Life 1 World Spicy Strips" as a love bouquet; sausages are linked together to form "Nine-section Whip Sausages" as a rope swing.

The protagonists of these shooting scenes are all young people, and in two episodes of "Crazy Daily Life", "post-00s" are explicitly mentioned. Compared with the edible value of the product itself, these contents focus more on the social value and communication value that the product can bring to young people.

Obviously, the significance of a theme store is not to sell goods, but to become a brand IP and generate content through products and space to trigger UGC dissemination.

4. Analyst Comments

It is undeniable that affordability is the first key for snacks to open up the market, but the more important reason for becoming an industry leader is to find the differentiated demands generated during the consumer replacement process and create added value for them beyond the products.

The establishment of a unique brand mindset is due to its unconventional approach of using online thinking for offline operations and content thinking for stores in the process of value creation.

Different from the mainstream choices that emphasize health, Snacks is very busy in store construction and product selection, which puts the happy experience brought by the store scene first. In terms of marketing, it shapes the store itself into an IP that produces content, creating brand differentiation while finding a way to spread the word.

However, there are two hidden concerns in today's busy snack food market: one is regional breakthrough, and the other is service quality.

Searching for "snacks are busy" on Xiaohongshu, in addition to checking in at stores, the most popular posts are about ghost names and employees complaining about being too tired at work. Although there are more than 10,000 stores, the regional dilemma of offline brands still exists, and there is still a long way to go before becoming a national brand.

Store service is also an issue that cannot be avoided offline. Due to the low gross profit margin, it is difficult to increase labor costs, but front-line employees who face consumers are an important touchpoint of the brand image. However, in the current social environment, if the relationship between employees, customers and companies is unbalanced, it is very easy for the brand to be criticized by public opinion. Manner is a lesson learned from the past.

Author | Li Zi This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Knife Skills Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Knife Skills Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in Operation Party, any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.